[GNC] Change a batch of transactions from income to Expense

[David Cousens]

The CSV import documentation is not very clear yet as the process was
rewritten and the documentation needs some updating - on the to do list.. 

>From the description you seem to be importing transactions to a bank
account. CSV formats are highly variable.  I usually setup a new dummy test
file to experiment with importing so I don't muck up my main accounts file
and when i have it right I do the import into my main set of books. When you
have sorted out a set of import settings that works you can save them with
an appropriate name in the import setup window and then use them for imports
form the same source.  If the CSV file is very long, I often create a
truncated copy of it with  5 or 6 typical transactions ( edit in spreadsheet
and reexport CSV) to experiment with rather than using a full file.

Make sure the date format selected in the setup window matches the format in
the file. At a minimum you will have to assign the Date, Description and
either the Deposit or Withdrawal headers to the columns in your data file
with that information.  You will need to skip any column header rows present
in the first few rows of the csv file. The setup page allows you to do this.

If your data file has the transaction amounts specified in a single column,
they will need to be +ve for transactions transferring money into the
account and -ve for transactions withdrawing from the account and in this
case you would normally assign the Deposit header to that column and not
assign a Withdrawal header to any column. If on import you find the
transactions are the wrong way round then clear the import and assign the
Withdrawal header to the column and repeat the import.

Some instiutions might provide transaction amounts in separate columns
usually labelled Debits and Credits in the header row they supply. In this
case you would normally apply The Deposit header to the column labelled
Credit and Withdrawal to the column labelled Debit. (if it imports the wrong
way, delete the transactions and reverse the assignment of the headers and
reimport.

Another format often is  a column with the amount and a second column with
either one of Dr or Debit or one of Cr or Credit in a second column. GnuCash
cannot recognize this. You may need to import the data into a spreadsheet
and create a single column with positive and negative amounts and then
reexport it as CSV before importing it into GnuCash.

Some banks will also export a column with an expense category. If this
exists you can assign the header for the transfer account to it. There is a
process in the import for mapping such categories onto the accounts used in
GnuCash.

When you get a setup which works save the setup and then use that setup to
import the file into your main accounts.

Good Luck

David Cousens



-----
David Cousens
--
Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html